BELINDA SINGLETON

BELINDA SINGLETON
​Why I Write

I was brought up on a diet of poetry and history – plus a good dollop of fairy stories and Greek myths, with a sprinkling of the King James Bible. Later, I had to acquire the less palatable language of management-speak and ‘measurable’ criteria.
 
I’ve written poetry since childhood; but with the demands of career and family I didn’t continue again until retirement. I also then followed up a very amateur interest in particle physics, saluting the readiness of top experts to acknowledge, often in the face of great cosmological questions: ‘We don’t know the answers.’ Such an initially unexpected link with poetry!
 
For that’s one of poetry’s joys: its uncertainty, its links. It’s a spidergram. I can start at the centre with ‘I’ and the family, radiate out to work, interests and the wider world, often unaware that links are developing across the strands. Memory itself is like a prism where the colours change with me as I gain new experiences, age in relation to those I write about or as the present re-assesses the past.
 
How do I think? How do I use language? My choice of subject and way of thinking of course affect my expression; but, more unexpectedly, form and language can affect my thinking, occasionally producing a shift or an ending that’s a surprise to my start. If it works, this can re-set the whole poem, maybe telling me that it’s not about the subject I envisaged after all, maybe creating a totally fresh link, making leaps in thought and language I couldn’t in prose. In writing a poem, always I have to write first drafts in pencil – something about linking hand and mind.
 
I learn so much from hearing others, past and present, gaining from their thinking and their craftsmanship. Why that subject? that form? that metaphor? that line break? How does the poem ‘sing in its chains’? I marvel at the way a fine poem always leaves something of itself behind.
 
So I write to discover, better to appreciate the best in doing so. I’m in thrall to poetry’s precision, its ambivalence, its over-and-aboveness; its ability to speak truth to power or engage in music or humour; to identify with Nature; to help me meet myself and those I love in all those spaces between laughter and loss, hurt and hope. To me, poetry is fellowship, work and play in one.
 
Belinda Singleton is the co-author of Wavelengths (2019) and the author of Foxes Don't Wear Watches.  ​